ABOUT

Welcome to Ben-Cotton.com.This is my personal website and blog.

I'm privileged to lead sales enablement for Automation Anywhere out of Seattlewhere I partner with over 100 sales professionals to help them succeed.

My work is focussed on the intersection between marketing and sales, where I use content, data, training and technology to build strategies that enable our rapidly growing sales team to crush its goals. At any given time I can be an advisor, coach or advocate. It's an ever evolving and challenging role, but rewarding and lots of fun.

Throughout my career I've helped businesses to grow by increasing website traffic, generating leads and driving sales. Today, I have a proven track record within the software as a service (SaaS) industry of leading and scaling programmesthat create predictable recurring revenue.

LATEST POSTS

Retention truly is the foundation of growth for software as a service (SaaS) companies, but oftentimes, it is overlooked and undervalued. This is always a huge mistake. High churn is a corollary of poor retention - but it can creep up unannounced, and rather than deal a single fatal blow, it causes death by a thousand small cuts.

Everybody likes to win. And while you undoubtedly learn much about your skills, attributes and character from losses, there’s nothing quite like that sense of satisfaction when your team secures a hard earned victory.

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is around building a sales enablement strategy and what that might look like. While each company, context and industry is different, I believe that there are some fundamentals that should form the blueprint of any sales enablement strategy.

I’ve been working within the software as a service (SaaS) industry for more than five years now. During this period I’ve learnt more than I ever thought possible and my personal growth has accelerated with each passing year.

Today, everyone working in and around sales and marketing knows that bots are hot, in vogue and quite simply, of the moment. That’s no secret. After years of dreaming about what might just be possible, over the past 12-18 months numerous software as a service (SaaS) companies from around the globe have taken their respective bot offerings to market.

One of the exciting aspects of working in an emerging area like sales enablement is that, today, nobody knows or indeed, has all the right answers. In many respects we’re “building the plane while flying it”, as we collectively figure out what good looks like.

For the most part, sales enablement is poorly defined and often misunderstood. Across the world conversations take place, day in, day out between business leaders as they decide the part that sales enablement can, should and will play within their organisation.

I consider myself fortunate to work at HubSpot, where day in, day out, I partner with over 100 sales reps that are at the top of the game, and only want to get better. It’s a truly inspiring place to ply my trade. Unlike other parts of the business, it’s relatively uncommon for sales enablement to share learnings, best practices and successes with the outside world.

To me, there’s never been a better time to be a sales enablement professional. It’s a rapidly growing area and while there’s a lack of publicly available or indeed, widely adopted best practices and standards, this is due, largely to the fact, that many of us are figuring out exactly what sales enablement is, means and does.

ABOUT

I'm fortunate to have worked with a number of innovative organisations including HubSpot, Indeed, Edelman, Microsoft and PUMA.

It's been quite a journey and I've learnt how to leverage inbound marketing and selling to help organisations grow. On a personal level I bring a hunger to succeed and an entrepreneurial spirit, as well as a love of developing teams and desire to get stuff done. Everyday.

I regularly write and speak on the topics of sales and marketing alignment, inbound marketing and sales enablement, and have recently spoken at events in Amsterdam, Dublin, Helsinki, London and Oslo, as well as numerous online events for HubSpot, Selling Power, Sales Hacker, InsideSales.com, Sales for Life and the Sales Management Association.